Laptop won't boot after bios update

[persim]

I recently acquired an Asus Vivobook s400ca with a broken screen. The idea was to turn it into a Win 7 media center machine by outputting to my HDTV via hdmi.

I had everything working and set up properly and then decided to update the bios. I used the Asus Winflash bios update tool and everything appeared to work fine. The tool rebooted the machine and that's when nothing seemed to work anymore.

I had previously disabled Secure Boot Control and enabled Compatibility Support Module. I believe the flashed bios probably reverted these back to default.

Now the main problem is the output to my external monitor is no longer working. Since the screen is shattered and the external monitor isn't functioning, I can no longer see anything.

I have tried both the vga and hdmi and get no output. I have tried all combinations of pulling CMOS battery, pulling laptop battery, changing hard drive, not using a hard drive and trying to use an external dvd drive to boot Window 7. Nothing seems to do anything. I don't appear to be entering the bios (unfortunately I can't see anything to confirm this). When I power on, there appears to be a brief flutter of hard drive light activity then it stops. I believe there is probably some error message on the screen but I have no way of seeing what it is.

I am all out of ideas and would greatly appreciate any help that is offered.

 

[Laptop_Nerd]

Hi,

Blind troubleshooting is the only way around this hoping that the PC is inside windows already, press Windows+P together at the same time then press enter on your keyboard hoping to change the default screen setting into a duplicate screen. Make sure the external monitor is connected when doing this steps.

Hope this helps.

 

[persim]

Hi,

Blind troubleshooting is the only way around this hoping that the PC is inside windows already, press Windows+P together at the same time then press enter on your keyboard hoping to change the default screen setting into a duplicate screen. Make sure the external monitor is connected when doing this steps.

Hope this helps.

I'm positive that it isn't making it to Windows. Something is happening right after turning it on that is preventing it from doing anything. The frustrating part is that I was previously able to use the external monitor to see the bios. But after the bios update, I can no longer do that.

I was able to put another hard drive in and managed to install a full version of Mint linux. When this drive is in the machine it will boot into linux with no problems from a powered off position. After the power button is pressed there is a brief moment where the external monitor appears unconnected but then there is a flicker on the laptop screen and the external monitor works. After that I can see everything on the external monitor.

This is super frustrating as I fear that I have ruined the machine somehow with a stupid bios update that probably wasn't needed. But the fact I can get linux to work and output to the external monitor makes me think that I should be able to get the windows hard drive working somehow.

 

[persim]

I was able to "borrow" the screen from a different laptop and connect it to the machine. With the new screen connected, I could see that the bios settings had been put back to default. Secure Boot Control had been re-enabled and was preventing output to the secondary monitor. I disabled Secure Boot Control and then enabled Compatibility Support Module. Everything works now as it should.